Sunday, December 10, 2006
"Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind," wrote George Orwell in his prescient essay "Politics and the English Language."
Beset as we Americans are by a misguided war, errant governance, unaddressed environmental threats and growing social injustice, it is perhaps easy to downplay the importance of language in solving our problems in a rationale manner.
While Orwell became familiar with the manipulation and corruption of language through the fascist and communist movements of the 1930s, he would most certainly be discouraged by the degree to which mutant parlance has advanced since he wrote his celebrated essay 50 years ago. Borrowing from the commercial advertisers and PR "consultants," politicians now spin, distort and lie to sell themselves with ever greater impunity, creating deceptive virtual worlds of pseudo reality in the process.
In the last few years, the wanton corruption of the meaning of words in political discourse has reached a perilous point where it is difficult to take the utterance of any public figure at face value. The Bush administration's tortured defense of the Iraq war effort leading up to the congressional elections could serve as Exhibit A.
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," Orwell continued. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were to long words or exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
Orwell was not the first historical figure to point out how, when a people lose control of their language, they may also lose control of their destiny.
In observing the downfall of Athens during the Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides described a similar decline: "To fit in with the change of events, words too had to change," he wrote as Athens launched the misbegotten Sicilian campaign that led to its downfall.
"What used to be described as thoughtless acts of aggression was now regarded as the courage that one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was taken to be just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides was taken to mean that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was taken as the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was viewed perfectly legitimate self-defense. ... Indeed, most people were more willing to call villainy rather than cleverness simple-minded honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the latter."
The avalanche of corrupted and abused language and sophistry that has been generated by the Bush administration and the Republican Party has become our contemporary "cuttlefish ink." Consider the following terms born out of the Iraq War:
Camp Victory: The name of the huge U.S. military base at Baghdad International Airport might now be more accurately described as Camp Defeat.
Extraordinary renditions: A banality that hides the repugnant reality that allows suspects to be kidnapped, spirited abroad, interrogated and even tortured in a foreign country without any due process.
Information extraction: A euphemism that has come to be synonymous with the torturing of suspects into giving confessions.
Waterboarding: A term that while it seems to be describing some harmless recreation sport -- perhaps a cross between skateboarding and surfing -- is actually a cruel and unusual form of punishment.
The Healthy Forests Restoration Act: The name of a piece of legislation that was in large part an invitation for the wood products timber industry to exploit the nation's forestlands.
Clear Skies legislation: A law that was actually a watered-down substitute for a different piece of legislation that would have gone much further in limiting dangerous levels of acid and mercury emissions from power plants.
With regularity, such reassuringly positive-sounding names have often been deceptively used to make their darker purposes more palatable so that the real situation is obscured by a linguistic misnomer calculated to confuse the public.
And then, of course, there is the bait-and-switch ruse of renaming things in such high-speed, serial fashion that finally the public grows so utterly confused and bewildered that cynicism about language is the only plausible reaction. Recently, "benchmarks" for determining progress in Iraq have become "timetables" and "milestones," even as the Bush administration denies that any such measures -- or pressures -- were being imposed by the United States on the so-called Iraqi government.
Indeed, so far out of alignment with any reasonable interpretation of reality has Bush administration language become that it is almost as if we as citizens were now forced to live in two parallel universes, one real and one delusional.
As words have lost their descriptive power, we have suffered a break in the normative order. Our whole process of describing, thinking, discussing and acting has been corrupted at its source. Indeed, it is hard to know how to break out of this self-perpetuating feedback loop characterized by spin and deception so that political discourse actually conveys truth and meaning.
"If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought," Orwell continued. "To think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers."
So advanced is the degradation of language into artifice, and so confused have so many people become over the verbal deception heaped on them by political leaders, that if our republic is to survive, it is a truly urgent matter that an antidote be found.
When a disciple asked Confucius, an itinerant philosopher of the sixth century B.C., what he would do first if a king were to entrust him with a kingdom, he did not hesitate to say: "My first task would be to rectify the names." Explaining what he meant to his perplexed disciple, he said: "If the names are not correct and do not match realities, language has no object. If language has no object, action becomes impossible -- and therefore all human affairs disintegrate."
One perhaps hopes, doubtless in vain, that our leaders might consult the works of the great Chinese sage on the need for language and reality to be in sync, read Thucydidices about how Athenian democracy fell, or allow themselves to be reminded by George Orwell that the debasement of language is the equivalent of encouraging mutations in the basic building blocks of life to occur.
The warnings are there, if we care to heed them, that when a country's democratic leaders lose the ability to describe reality accurately and in a believable way, its people become handicapped in their quest to understand and solve their problems.
Orville Schell is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
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